The 9.7-inch iPad Pro and iOS 9.3 demonstrate that Apple is gradually implementing color management in iOS, and has made it available to developers. While the presence of color management isn’t obvious on the surface, Apple has added multiple new features that would typically depend on color management.
For many years, Photoshop users and other graphics professionals have wanted proper support for 10-bits-per-channel video displays (also known as 30-bit when counting the three RGB channels together) on Macs. This isn’t about the file format, but the data path to the video monitor. The 8 bits per channel displays almost all of us use today may show banding when displaying gradients, especially in grayscale images, shadows, and in colors dominated by a single channel. That banding goes away on 10bpc displays because of the additional display levels available to each channel.
The Late 2015 Retina iMac includes the first wide gamut display that Apple has made for a Mac, able to reproduce colors well outside the sRGB color gamut. I had questions about the P3 color gamut of the new iMac, so I went over to my local Apple Store to check it out.
Up to this point it’s been a conscious choice to buy a wide gamut monitor. I made that choice when I connected a wide gamut NEC PA272w to my Mac Pro. But now the P3 display is built into all of the new 4K and 5K Retina iMacs, so Retina iMac buyers will now be working with a wide gamut display whether they know it or not. While using a wide gamut monitor is generally a good thing, it can involve certain color challenges.
If you use an extended keyboard, you might think that the keys on the numeric keypad are mere duplicates. But in some applications they work differently than those on the main keyboard, particularly the Enter key. If you love boosting your productivity with keyboard shortcuts, understanding the different Enter keys can give you more of an edge. And even though laptops and other compact keyboards lack a numeric keypad, yours may have a hidden second Enter key that you can use.
Want the whole story? Click the link below to read my article at CreativePro.com:
A Tale of Two Enter Keys
In late 2014 Amazon had a great deal on the Samsung 840 EVO SSD, and I took the opportunity to upgrade my aging MacBook Pro with it. Replacing the original hard drive was quick and easy, and the improvement in performance was obvious and profound. Anything involving disk access now seemed instantaneous.
Soon after, I read on Anandtech that Samsung acknowledged a serious performance bug with the 840 EVO SSD that would dramatically slow down read performance for data that had not been rewritten in a while. The bug fix came out in October 2014, first as a Windows application, and with a Mac/Linux version promised by the end of October. As a Mac user I naturally waited until the Mac version came out and fortunately it became available for download a few days before the end of October. Unfortunately, the next challenge was to figure out how to install it.
conrad chavez | blog 